It was Christmas Day 2007. My sister Julia, my friend Audria and I motored on I-40 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff through a light snow that blew sideways like confetti shot from a winter cannon.
We had spent a few days in Santa Fe, reveling in the New Mexico slant on La Navidad—ambling down Canyon Road singing Christmas carols on streets lined by luminaria, warming ourselves beside bonfires and drinking mulled wine for sale from grownup versions of lemonade stands. On that overcast Christmas morning the three of us turned westward and began the drive home.
About an hour into the trip, the gas gauge hovered near E. We veered off the interstate and into a station on the Acoma reservation. A scrawny, brindle-colored dog speckled with dandruff sat beside the pumps. The dog was young but not a pup. No collar. No signs of care. I pumped gas. My sister went inside. Audria pulled out some beef jerky from our road trip food bag. The dog eyed her warily.
I went inside to pay, and when I returned, the dog was eating the jerky but giving Audria the I-don’t-trust-you eyeball. After some discussion Audria asked if we could take her. The idea was to transport the dog to Flagstaff, clean her up, park her in Second Chance and let someone adopt her. It would be a Christmas good deed.
It took a bit of cajoling to get the dog to jump into the backseat of my car, but she did, curled into herself and slept the entire ride. Back in Flag, Audria got her all shiny and healthy, and took her into the shelter. A few days later Audria returned to the shelter and took the dog home. That love thing had happened between them.
That dog love thing. It’s fierce, isn’t it? I have felt it for dogs who aren’t my own. I have seen it between dogs and their owners. I’ve watched movies about it, read books about it, poems. Dogs—the good ones—give. They bring. They attend. They teach.
Audria named the dog Pi and describes her as gentle and cautious. Pi was an omega dog—submissive, deferential, a pleaser. Her stubby, two-inch tail shimmied whenever she encountered another living creature. She and Audria were inseparable.
I called Pi the Love Ambassador.
Audria is an artist who finds solitude fertile and the natural world a wellspring of inspiration. Almost every late afternoon she and Pi headed into the woods to revere the trees and witness the golden hour distribute its shadows. Campbell Mesa was a favorite, and so was an annual springtime camping trip to the Tonto Basin.
Pi was one of those dogs that epitomized the spirit the beloved poet Mary Oliver pays homage to in some of her poems. “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?” Oliver asks.
Pi died this past Christmas, 11 years to the day that she and Audria found one another. Buddy, Jack, Zia, Lola, Bo, Kofi—they are all gone. They weren’t mine; they belonged to friends who loved them and lost them. Losing a dog carries with it a specific poignance. And loving a dog carries with it the understanding that you will endure their death and mourn their absence in your life. What does dog love open us to? Loyal companionship, unconditional affection, unabashed need and dependence.
When I was 8 or 9 my family got our first dog, a beagle named Leroy. We lived in the suburbs with an unfenced yard and a nearby highway that claimed the life of Leroy and the three or four dogs we had afterward. We had some of them for less than a year. I stopped attaching.
The only constant dog in my childhood life was Baron, my grandfather’s German shepherd. Baron bared his teeth at us kids, barked a lot and scared me. My life now is based on a diet of transit with no place for the constancy dogs do best with. But I want to love and be loved by dogs. Norbu, Gracie, Zhozhi, Gomez, Dixie—they are still with us, bringing their owners and those of us in their orbit their joyful yes. And then there are those I shall remember like Pi, who spun like a whirling dervish when I visited: tail twitching, eyes bright, ever playful and embodying the most noble and necessary thing of all—love.
